Friday, December 15, 2006

Christopher Knight on the Eakins Kerfuffle

Christopher Knight's art-year-in-review for the L.A. Times includes the following:

"Philadelphia's Thomas Jefferson University announced the joint sale of Thomas Eakins' monumental 1875 'The Gross Clinic,' arguably America's greatest 19th-century painting, to Washington's National Gallery and a not-yet-built Arkansas museum planned by a Wal-Mart heiress. 'Foul!' squealed the local art establishment — the same folks who are busily enabling destruction of America's greatest privately assembled Modern art collection, the nearby Barnes Foundation. The spectacle of rank hypocrisy is — well, gross."